At PAX West 2023, I had the opportunity to check out Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. From that hands-on experience, the game looked like a ton of fun and seemed like we could put countless hours into it. With less than a month to the game’s scheduled release, Cygames and Arc System Work. CO. announced that the game would be delayed; the game was set to be released on November 30, 2023. Now the game is scheduled to be released on December 14, 2023.
With the decision to push back the game’s release by two weeks, Arc System Work has announced a second open beta for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. The second open beta will take place from November 9th and go until November 12th, 2023. The beta will feature cross-platform multiplayer action. The beta will be available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Steam.
The beta address is: https://rising-betatest.granbluefantasy.jp/en/
Below is the statement made by game director Tetsuya Fukuhara regarding the delay.
Cause of the Delay for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising
After our first online beta was held in July, the development team pulled out all the stops to rework the game’s mechanics and battle design in time for the initially scheduled release date. Despite our best efforts, however, it has become clear to me that additional time will be needed to put the finishing touches on the game.
Upon completing our adjustments to the game’s battle mechanics, we revealed the changes during our Balance and System Adjustments stream on October 20 and the first public playtest at the “GBVS Official Tournament, vol. 7” last weekend, where they were met with an overwhelmingly positive reception.
However, due to the number of modes that were affected by these changes, we found the overall impact to be much larger than anticipated and decided that, in order to meet player expectations, we would need two more weeks of polish and debugging to put out a truly high-quality product. We regret announcing this as the second beta is just around the corner, but please rest assured that the beta schedule itself has not changed.
